Herald criticized for website comments

The NAACP criticized The Miami Herald for allowing racist comments to be posted on its website.

BY JOHN VOSKUHL

jvoskuhl@MiamiHerald.com

The president of the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP has objected to racist reader comments posted below an article on The Miami Herald's website last month.

The Oct. 3 article, about the trial of eight former employees of a Bay County boot camp who were charged with letting a black teenager die on their watch, drew comments that ''are totally unacceptable for an organization of your caliber to promote,'' wrote Bishop Victor Curry, in a letter to the newspaper's editors.

Miami Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal said Saturday the comments were removed from the website ``as soon as we saw them.''

A sample of the comments, which Curry said he had taken verbatim from The Herald's website, included offensive references to the teen as a n----- and assertions that because he was black, his death was good for society.

''Just think about all the money we saved,'' said one sample that Curry included in his Oct. 31 letter.

''They killed him at 14, you know that by the time he was 30 he would have been in [and] out of jails hundreds of [times],'' the comment said.

The story in question was posted by The Miami Herald as a breaking news article on Oct. 3 -- meaning that it and the comments it drew have since disappeared from the website without being archived.

The newspaper has been allowing readers to post comments to most stories on its website for the past few months, and ''this is an example of the kind of dilemma we're dealing with every day since the commenting started a few months ago,'' Gyllenhaal said.

Newspapers nationwide are coming to terms with how to monitor readers' online postings, a growing facet of many websites.

Last month, stories at MiamiHerald.com drew about 500,000 comments.

At The Herald, ''we monitor the commentary and when either a reader or we see comments that are beyond the bounds of taste, or are unacceptable, we remove them,'' Gyllenhaal said.

In his letter, Curry asked what The Herald plans to do to prevent the posting of such negative comments.

Gyllenhaal said the newspaper takes a number of steps to monitor and shape the tone of comments while still allowing ''the kind of wide-open debate'' that online postings enable.

For example, the newspaper's website is equipped with filters designed to prevent certain offensive words, including the n-word, from appearing in readers' posts.

Nonetheless, Gyllenhaal said, there's no way to see the tone and content of readers' comments before they are posted -- which means that each comment will appear on the site for a period of time before Herald editors can respond.

The January 2006 death of 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson at a boot camp near Panama City has been freighted with racial concerns from the beginning.
Guards were seen on videotape hitting and kicking him and sticking fingers into pressure points on his head.

Medical experts disagreed on the cause of death, however.

One said it was natural causes; another said Anderson had suffocated.

A jury acquitted seven guards and a nurse who were charged with aggravated manslaughter in his death, but the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has announced that it will investigate the case.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami_dade/story/295141.html

I bet some of you racist white supremisisisisissss bastards here at VNN had something to do with this. HAIL!!!!!